Thursday, September 10, 2009

"First you say you will, then you won't"

Today is Thursday. Does you know what office Christy Mihos is running for?

The shortest-lived U.S. Senate campaign came and went within hours this week with Mihos shifting from the GOP race for governor to the Senate primary and back again. Did he suffer brain freeze from chugging a Slurpee too fast?

So anyway, Christy is veering away from Capitol Hill and back to Beacon Hill, while Andrew Card, whose claim to history will be as the man who interrupted the reading of My Pet Goat, is thinking of coming home, sort of, to chase the GOP Senate nomination (and chase Ayla Brown's father out of the race).

This is the biggest opportunity they’ve had in a long time,” said Thomas Whalen, a social science professor at Boston University. “Leave it to the state GOP to take defeat out of the jaws of victory. They’ll blow it. They always find a way.”

Card, who hasn't lived in Massachusetts in more than 20 years, was once an up and coming Republican liberal, teaming with then Marshfield state representative Phil Johnston as a corruption-fighting team.

A dazzling failure in the 1982 Republican gubernatorial primary (against a candidate so unmemorable I can't recall his name), Card drifted away -- and to the right. A loyal aide to George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, he was the man whispering in Bush's ear on Sept. 11, 2001.

But with the state GOP is such disarray, Card is somehow being seen as a savior, even though his last major appearance in Massachusetts, to accept an honorary degree at UMass, didn't work out that well.

Let's see now: a man who played a pivotal role in an administration that failed to take terror threats seriously, then led us into a war with Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction -- not to mention set the stage for the economic collapse triggered by an unregulated Wall Street.